Robert B. Downs (1903–1991)

Well worth the read. It's organized by author, not work, where possible. Books with multiple authors receive a single entry. Authors with multiple significant works, e.g., Aristotle, get longer articles than authors with just one significant work, e.g., the Venerable Bede. Each article typically includes: 1) some historical context, 2) a brief biography 3) a discussion of the work's reception, 4) an assessment of the author's work by some modern historian or literary writer. Pedestrian, show more perhaps, but useful, too.

I read the articles in reverse order, I recommend this choice. In the period between the late Roman Empire and the Renaissance, notable authors are spread very thinly across the centuries, sometimes there is a gap of 50 years between the death of one author and the birth of the next. In other periods, e.g., the late Roman Republic and Early Empire the authors cluster, often they knew each other in real life. show less

The authors and works you never heard of are in the list because their work can be said to have influenced Hitler in some way, and because Hitler looms very large in the author's mind because the book was written in the '50s.

"The Invention of Science", which is a very thorough and scholarly work, attempts to refute the assumption of just about everybody, including the author of this book, that Copernicus's "De Revolutionibus" was extraordinarily influential. He points out that Copernicus's show more was just a rearrangement, and that the stars are still fixed in Copernicus's outer shell, not going off in all directions as we know they do today. He shows that many natural philosophers of the subsequent years seemed to take little interest in Copernicus's work and he argues that it was Tycho Brahe, whose concept of the universe was a whole lot more three-dimensional that had the greater influence. He could be correct, but that's a lot of accepted wisdom to overthrow.

There is an interesting, to me, passage in the chapter on "Mein Kampf" which I've included in the Common Knowledge section. Hitler wrote about techniques of propaganda, and one of his central principles was to keep it simple, to give the people just one enemy to hate, and whenever you want to mobilize them against anything, associate that thing with the one true enemy. In his case, this was "the Jews". But if we look at today's propaganda, I think the one true enemy is the only slightly more abstract "white supremacy/racism" and so everything must be connected to that. We note, of course, that the doctrine that only "white" people can be racist helps to make this abstract evil into a concrete race, in this case "whites" instead of Jews. In the quotation I've attached in the Common Knowledge section, Hitler rants against France but manages to achieve, by words and not by logic a connection to the Jews, who are at the bottom of the French evil. One can imagine some 1930's German, unaffected by the propaganda, laughing at the shear incoherence of this man's invective. But we have the same incoherence now, as everything that is disliked by the propaganda machine is turned into "white supremacy" by words and not by logic. That is how Larry Elder becomes "The Black Face of White Superemacy" and so forth. We deride the incoherence of the propaganda, just as our hypothetical reader of "Mein Kampf" derides its incoherence, but maybe that is to utterly miss the point. It seems to be working reasonably well on the masses now and it was quite effective then. show less

Original price 35 cents and falling apart, and furthermore written before I was born, this was my introduction to influential books. Good thumbnail sketches. Still holds up.

Let's start by saying this book is over 60 years old but out of the sixteen books covered I've read one (Uncle Tom's Cabin); have another which I still intend to read (The Prince) and I have not heard of two (Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power on History and Mackinder's The Geographical Pivot of History). Split into two sections - The World of Man, which covers 10 books, and The World of Science, about 6 books. Each section is in published chronological order - from Macchiavelli to Hitler show more and from Copernicus to Einstein. I like the way that Downs talks about his selections, a bit of background to the author and the times their writings first appeared; a bit about the actual book; and then the impact at that time and why he thinks that they have had a lasting impact. It hasn't encouraged me to actually get around to reading the selections but at least I am more informed about these influential works. show less